AUTHOR INTERVIEWS - Alf Rehn

Alf Rehn is Professor of innovation, design, and management and Director of CODES (Center for Organizational Datafication and its Ethics in Society) at Syddansk Universitet. He is also a speaker, a strategic advisor, a board professional, an author, and a nap connoisseur. He can be found through his website alfrehn.com – and on most serious social media as @alfrehn. 

Q: Why did you write The Polycrisis?

Honestly? Because the world stopped making sense and the existing books weren't helping. Mika and I kept watching crises behave in ways no crisis manual had prepared anyone for (Texas frost somehow becoming a packaging shortage somehow becoming global inflation) and we thought, someone should write about this. Then we realized that someone was probably us. Also, Mika is disturbingly enthusiastic about complexity science. I blame the Finnish climate.

Q: What is your key message, your philosophy that you want to transfer to the reader?

Stop trying to manage complexity and start learning to read it. The FONIC framework – Fragile, Overlapping, Nonlinear, Interconnected, Cascading – is less a recipe and more a grammar. A way of perceiving why crises don't behave the way you expect, and why your well-intentioned response occasionally makes things go FUBAR. Also: Redundancy is not waste. Efficiency is not safety. These are things we somehow forgot as a civiliation, and now Dutch farmers can threaten the global semiconductor supply chain. Which is quite an achievement for manure.

Q: Anything else you would like to add?

The book was partly written using AI tools, which we disclose openly in the preface. 

Writing about how yesterday's tools are insufficient for today's challenges while refusing to use any tools developed after 1985 seemed intellectually inconsistent.

Beyond that… This is not a handbook and we are not selling a resilience protocol. 

What Mika and I wanted was to give readers a language for what they're already experiencing but struggling to name. If you finish the book and the news makes slightly more sense, we've done our job. If you finish it and feel mildly unsettled about how fragile everything is, we've also done our job. Both are fine.